Day After Tomorrow - my opinion

Adequate, but not great. Worth seeing for sure if you love special effects/cgi/large-scale natural disasters. They can do amazing things with fluid simulations now, so the clouds, atmospheric effects and water stuff was all really impressive. I'm a fan of Donnie Dar... I mean Jake Gyllenhaal, so it helps having him in the movie instead of some generic dude.

The problem is, the melodrama is the stick, and the weather stuff is the popsicle, but Hollywood figures you gotta have way more stick than I personally need to support the popsicle. I mean, I would have been in heaven to see a movie called "Two Hours of Plot-Free CGI Extreme Global Weather Catastrophe!!!" I'd pay good money if they'd make a movie called "Spaceship Battles" with killer fx and just enough actors so you'd get a sense of how the battles were being directed, but no more than that. But that's just me. And, those effects had to be $$$$$$$, so I guess they keep costs down by having a lot of acting. I'm not saying I don't like acting - I really take great joy in watching excellent performances, but some movies just don't need that many "human drama" scenes.

I was really interested in how they were setting things up scientifically, but the main thrust of the story was kinda ho-hum (I won't spoil it for you), not embarrassingly bad like some movies can be, but pretty uninspired. Not bad summer destructo-popcorn-eye-candy, which coming from my jaded little brain is actually a pretty major compliment.

A lot of people have been saying that there is a subtle political aspect to it. Did you see that in the movie?

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Not so much. I mean, one of the good guys gets to slam one of the bad guy politicians pretty soundly, but the bad-guy politicians are set up like the bad guy politicians in any movie of this genre (that is, to get slammed for their blindness/arrogance). So it didn't seem political as much as it just seemed conventional for this type of movie. In other words, if it is subtly political, it's because you couldn't make a movie on this topic and escape that completely. Not because the filmmakers are trying to persuade you.

It really just capitalizes on the scenario and expects that you either believe it's plausible or are willing to suspend your disbelief that it's implausible, just like any movie of this sort.

I think the comments about it being political are more a result of the defensiveness of politicians who don't believe in human-induced global climate change and feel defensive because in this trope they're the bad guys. It really comes off as a disaster movie, not as a cautionary or political tale, but I can see people in the current US administration feeling like it's a political jab. But they see everything that posits a different view than theirs as a political jab, and they're under attack on a lot of issues so they're kind of sensitized to it.

Having said that, I think people who are concerned about global climate change will use this film to stimulate debate and awareness of the issue, but that's a function of those people more so than anything the movie seems to be trying to accomplish.

Do you like how neutral I'm staying here? I have very strong feelings about the human potential to affect the climate, but I don't want to turn this into a political thread and have it closed. This is a movie review.

I prefer more popsicle stick, myself. I hated Troy because there was no stick, and I refuse to see Day After because I know there is no stick.

Neo... there is no stick...

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See, now in a movie like Troy I would want a lot of stick too. So I won't go see it on the same grounds. The basis of the source story is stick, and there's a lot of potential there to really affect people. But from what I've read and heard about Troy, I don't have any confidence that there will be any substantial human drama. In my own system, DAT falls under a different classification so I can attenuate my expectations accordingly.